Hunters shoot down Google's aerial fibre links

Google network engineer manager Vijay Gill revealed at last week's AusNOG conference in Sydney that his company has decided to build an underground path for the fibre links to its data center in Oregon, because the aerial fibre links were regularly shot down by hunters:

The poles also hosted aerially-deployed fibre connected to Google's $US600 million ($A635 million) data centre in the Dalles, a small city on the Columbia River in the US state of Oregon.

"What people do for sport or because they're bored, they try to shoot at the insulators," Gill said.

"I have yet to see them actually hit the insulator, but they regularly shoot down the fibre.

"Every November when hunting season starts invariably we know that the fibre will be shot down, so much so that we are now building an underground path [for it]."